- Hatch Patterns - Some hatch patterns or a lot of hatching can slow down drawings. This appears to be especially true in Architectural Desktop. Since ADT provides hatching to scale for you as you draw walls, sections, or details, there is no real need to use the hatch command as much. If you do manual 2D drawing in ADT and hatch a lot of the drawing, you may see performance suffer.
- Paperspace, Viewports, and Layouts - When we first were presented with paperspace layout tabs in AutoCAD, some of us went hog wild and created drawings with more layouts than would fit across the bottom of the screen without scrolling. Now we've gone back the other direction and are breaking drawings up more and utilizing Project Navigator. If you are still using one drawing for everything and dividing your sheets up with multiple viewports, then read on.
- MAXACTVP - Controls the number of active viewports. You can increase performance by reducing this number or if you want to see all viewports and cannot, increase the number.
- LAYOUTREGENCTL - This controls whether your system regenerates each time you change to a different layout tab or whether it caches. Use Task Manager and watch performance with different settings to find the one that works best for you.
- Other performance variables: INDEXCTL - helpful for demand loading xref's and creating layer and spatial indexes. DRAWORDERCTL - Controls the display of overlapping objects. Default is 3, which will slow performance the most.
- Fonts - If you use Windows True Type Fonts (TTF) as opposed to the old AutoCAD standby of .shx, you may see some decrease in performance. I have not experienced this and use a mixture of Romans.shx and Arial. I have heard a lot about this though and would consider it worth checking. You could try changing your fonts in Text Style formatting from anything that is not .shx to any .shx font and see if you experience a difference.
- Plotters - I mentioned this before, but it seems to make so much difference I want to mention it again. Depending on your version, you will find Plotter Manager in either your File or Format pull down menu. If you see Add-A-Plotter listed, delete it. Also, if you have plotters listed that you do not use or have any longer, delete them.
Your comments and helpful hints are always appreciated. Each version that comes out seems to have more and more settings that can really affect performance one way or another.
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2 comments:
The setting of LAYOUTREGENCTL can have a significant performance impact with some drawings. While it may sound like a good idea to cache all layout tabs (value of 2, the default), drawings with many layout tabs consume increasingly more memory as each one is generated. Depending on the amount of physical memory your computer has this can seriously slow down the computer. Setting LAYOUTREGENCTL to 1 will typically solve this problem as then only the model space and last layout used will be cached. For systems very low on memory a value of 0 regens each time.
-Tim
Honey Run Apiaries
Tim,
Thank you for your informative post. I always appreciate more input.
Beth
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